May 5, 2005 Radio Commentary -- Democracy and
American Culture in Iraq

A coherent picture is finally starting to emerge of U.S.-built
“democracy” in Iraq. A deeply postmodern administration that
consistently believes in symbolism over substance, and that seems to
have no recognizable conception of democracy, has built in Iraq exactly
what its worst critics might have predicted.

In some spheres, democracy has been reduced to meaninglessness; in
others, it has been redefined as corruption, repression, and lack of
accountability.

We saw a worldwide orgy of media coverage over the undeniable courage
of Iraqis in turning out to vote, complete with purple-stained
Republican fingers at the State of the Union address. But for three
months, as politicians were locked in sectarian wrangling and refused
to form a government, we heard almost nothing. It’s almost enough to
make you forget that the point of those elections was to form that
government, which was then supposed to do something.

And now that the government has been formed, it is scheduled to lock
itself in even more intractable sectarian wrangling over the
constitution; meanwhile, no responsible Iraqi body will be addressing
the severe needs of the people.

We have a “democratic” Iraqi government that beats,
arrests, and intimidates reporters, routinely confiscates TV tapes,
and even arrests journalists for “insulting” politicians. Many
reporters say they refuse to cover the new Iraqi security forces
because of harassment; others have quit their jobs entirely. The
Baghdad bureau of al-Jazeera remains closed, as it has been for months.
Let’s leave aside the distressingly frequent killing of Arab reporters
by American troops.

The new system is ferociously
corrupt. Transparency International reports that Iraqi businessmen
universally complain about the need for bribery in all dealings with
the government; some say the level of corruption is an order of
magnitude beyond that of Saddam’s regime in the late years of the
sanctions. The report says the new Iraq could become “the biggest
corruption scandal in history.”

This comes after the massive corruption of the U.S.-run Coalition
Provisional Authority, which spent or committed over $19 billion of
Iraqi oil revenues, much of it to U.S. corporations, but has been
unable to account for $8.8 billion of Iraq’s money.

Initially, the administration had grandiose schemes of remaking Iraq in
the neoconservative image, with a government stamped “Made in the USA”
that had nothing discernibly Iraqi about it. Now that those notions
have collapsed completely, they have reversed course and for the past
year have been seeking the most efficient of Saddam Hussein’s
executioners in the military and from his dreaded Mukhabarat to destroy
their enemies for them.

They have started working
with informal militias, not under the control of the Iraqi
government, to carry out their most deadly missions. The most
important, Adnan Thabit’s Special Police Commandos, are drawn mostly
from the Saddam-loyalist Republican Guard. Thabit is being advised by
Jim Steele, whose last important job was working with El Salvador’s
paramilitary death squads.

In El Salvador, the United States at least had the shame to try to hide
its connections with the death squads; in Iraq, U.S. officers talk
openly about how these militias supposedly won’t feel the constraints
that Americans feel. Given that Americans beat detainees to death,
administer electric shocks, and carry out mock executions, it is not
quite clear what those constraints are.

Perhaps the flagship of the new Iraqi democracy so graciously created
by the United States is the TV show “Terror in the Hands of Justice,”
which airs twice daily with videotaped confessions of tortured Iraqi
resistance fighters. Where, even in the history of repressive police
states, have you heard of the like?

The show is Thabit’s brainchild, but the idea of demonizing the
resistance by saying they are homosexuals could equally well be his own
idea or inspired by the infamous techniques being used by American
soldiers in Abu Ghraib.

All in all, the United States has created in Iraq not the slightest
shred of representative democracy or liberal culture but rather a
twisted amalgam of Iraqi political culture under Saddam and American
political culture under Bush.

Usually, when we intervene, we say it’s to inject American culture and
democracy when really we’re trying to create a client state where
popular aspirations are repressed in favor of U.S. imperial interests.
This time, it seems, we actually have
injected American culture -- the narrowest, most bigoted form, which is
what dominates the country today -- into Iraq.